"Microsoft's phone chief hates to call the new Nokia Lumia 521 cheap, but the lower-priced smartphone launching in the United States is the company's boldest move yet to win mass market share from leaders Apple and Samsung. The world's largest software company has so far focused on putting its Windows Phone software into expensive, high-end devices - chiefly from Nokia and HTC. But the new model will go on sale at Walmart later this month at an unsubsidized price under $150, relatively cheap for a new phone running up-to-date software without a long-term contract." Windows Phone is racing to the bottom just as fast as Android - with the difference being that expensive Android devices do not fail to sell.

The .NET Framework has seen numerous releases, with the most recent release this past Fall. Visual Studio 2012 is written in a combination of C#, C++, and WPF using mixed mode technologies pioneered in .NET .

The Windows Phone app store with 150,000 applications are apps written in .NET, the Windows Store with 60,000 applications is almost completely filled with apps written in .NET .

Silverlight started off as WPF/E, or WPF Everywhere. It is a browser based implementation of their WPF framework which works across Windows, Linux, OSX, and Windows Phone.

The technologies pioneered in WPF and Silverlight form the core of Windows today. Windows 8 and its app model are based entirely on technologies pioneered in .NET .

The .NET Framework has spawned a vibrant community (Codeplex, Nuget, various hubs around the internet) which is basically Microsoft's personal developer army.

According to Microsofties, there were around 8 MILLION .NET developers a year ago.

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.NET has been one of Microsoft's unmistakable successes. It just defies logic that you'd claim otherwise. It was the best strategic move for the Developer Division in decades.

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The Surface has made Microsoft a couple hundred MILLION dollars in less than a quarter with limited availability (The Surface Pro is available in the US, Canada, and very recently China). Even then, some reports had Windows 8 up to 7.5% of the market.

Surface Pro retails for $800 dollars. Microsoft's ASP on their tablet offerings are incredibly high, to the point where they can extract quite a bit of revenue from a modest amount of volume.